Here's something I did to a Deskpro 4000 I rescued a few years ago. The computer worked fine, but the chassis was in such poor condition that I decided to build a new case for it. Out of cardboard. But the Cardboard Pro 4000 isn't your garden-variety cardboard PC. This one has an LED light tube and a window revealing its CCFL-lit innards! And a ton of tape. It's a miracle it hasn't fallen apart after 3 years of use!

First of all, the specs:
-An unlocked PII "Klamath" 300MHz
-192MB worth of EDO SIMMs
-Proprietary 440FX chipset motherboard
-20GB Maxtor hard drive
-Powercolor Radeon 7000 PCI (64MB DDR)
-SB Live
-A PCI USB 1.1 card. The mobo doesn't have an onboard USB controller.
-Cnet Pro200WL PCI network card
-LG CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive
-Currently running Win95 and 2000
-A bunch of lights, tape, and cardboard

What I'll probably end up doing is turn this machine into a speed-sensitive DOS gaming box. The unlocked Klamath and jumpers on this motherboard make it very easy to run the CPU at 133MHz and/or disable the L2. This slows games down to the point of being playable.

Here are a few pictures of Cardboardpro 4000, hooked up to the e771p test monitor and running Win2k setup.

Front light off:

Front light set to slowly fade in and out. I believe this is one of those things that is so ugly, it's cute.

A peek inside:

Top panel removed:

Six 32MB 60ns EDO SIMMs:

A standard AT power connector, along with a proprietary 10-pin 3.3v aux power connector. The computer is turned on/off by a mechanical, mains voltage switch. This is the first P2 based machine I've seen without an electronically-controlled power supply. It's also the first P2 motherboard I've seen without onboard USB.

This power supply is huge--it's bigger than the 650w Corsair that powers my main computer. Despite its size and weight, it only puts out 160w.

Compaq's unusual flush-mounted Slot 1 connector makes the P2 look like a very large socketed CPU. I used three 40mm fans pulled from an old HDD cooler to keep the heatsink cool. The Klamath-300 is the fastest CPU this board will run properly. Deschutes, Mendocino, and Katmai all run with the L2 cache disabled.

And yes, I used an elastic band to hold the three fans down. It works extremely well. I've moved this machine several times without disturbing the highly elaborate elastic band/fan setup. 😁

Back of the unit. The DVI port on the Radeon 7000 can actually drive my LCD at its native 1920x1200 under Win2000. However, with Win95, digital output seems to be limited to 640x480. Anything higher results in massive display corruption. Screen redraws @ 1920x1200 under Win2k can be a little slow, especially when minimizing/maximizing a browser window. The EDO RAM and 66MHz FSB are probably the largest performance bottlenecks here.

My favourite benchmark: